Offseason of infrastructure

Kevin Sherrington: "What I want to talk about is [new assistant general manager] Shiraz Rehman. How much impact is he- have you gotten an idea of what he is going to do, what actually he is going to do and how much say he's gonna have and how much he's gonna impact this organization?"

Evan Grant: "Since Thad Levine left to go to the Twins, there has been a void in the front office, and Shiraz fills that for the Rangers. He brings the- I think Matt Vinnola was very good as a rules and arbitration and interpretation guy. I think Shiraz also has that skill set. I think Shiraz draws from kind of the same background as Thad on a communicator [level] and [as] kind of a guy who can distill everybody's thoughts in the room and put them into a good summation. I also think that this is a guy who comes with significant research and development background -- now he's not gonna run research and development, that's gonna fall under [assistant GM] Josh Boyd, but he will be significantly involved in it. And things could go in a lot of different ways, but we're also seeing something of a trend here in baseball of GMs eventually moving up into these presidents roles and you wanna keep some continuity, then an assistant moves into the title of GM. I think that Shiraz going from an assistant GM role in Chicago, where he was a little bit lower on the totem pole, to the place he's at now puts him in the line of succession potentially. I don't know that that's the reason he was hired, I don't know ultimately that that's exactly what the Rangers are thinking, but yeah, to answer your question, this guy's gonna have a significant impact.

"And I think Kevin, all the moves like Shiraz Rehman and whatever else the Rangers do in building out the front office, the player development staff -- they hired a new farm director in Matt Blood to give them an extra body at the top of the player development staff -- the manager, the coaching staff, these are all foundation moves that the Rangers are making and those are gonna be more significant, I think, than any personnel move that they make with the roster this year because this is an offseason of infrastructure. The idea for 2019 is get the right people in place, empower them, get everybody working together, and then make big leaps afterwards. The other thing that Jon [Daniels] talked about was aligning things, and things don't align right now. They don't have the pitching to compete in the big leagues, they may have to make the moves eventually with guys who are further down the clock towards free agency to kind of re-position their team. And so right now, the idea is, 'Hey, maybe this team's fallen behind in how it did things. Let's fix that, and then we'll move forward from that place.'"